A Visitor Experience from Hell
Linda Walton
Last October I visited Penrhyn Castle, attracted by the promise made in the National Trust guidebook of the chance to ‘experience the luxury of the exquisite carving and furnishings’. The guidebook did say that visitors would also explore the castle’s links to slavery and the industrial dispute that the construction of the building had provoked in the local community. I was genuinely interested in the latter and regarded the former as a modern inevitability that I would be able to sidestep if I chose. How wrong I was.
The castle was dominated by the exploration of links to slavery undertaken through a project with local schools. Large screens in each room displayed pictures of objects from the property accompanied by short paragraphs or poems describing the children’s reflections on them. Worse, the curator had added her remarks that were, in some cases, more childish that those of the young people.
To display these screens, every room had been plunged into darkness. It was impossible to make out any of the rooms’ contents or decoration. Only on the main staircase could you get some feel for the magnificence of the interior, presumably because this was the only space where screens could not be erected. The gloominess of the volunteer team matched the gloom of the interior. The welcome at reception was cold; as I groped my way though the dark rooms no one offered to share with me anything about the castle’s relationship with the local community or the history of its construction. It felt to me as if the installation of the slavery exhibition had drained their enthusiasm, just as it was draining mine.
It seemed to me that the curator and her team had chosen not only to suppress the ‘mansion experience’ on which the National Trust now regularly pours scorn, but also to downplay any historical perspectives not associated with either colonialism or slavery. I did not join the Trust to be force-fed a diet of selective history. By all means raise our awareness of contemporary issues, but not at the expense of all the other rich understandings that the Trust’s properties can offer us.
What a pleasure it was, therefore, to visit recently Wordsworth’s House in Cockermouth, a charming town house with links to the poet’s family. The volunteer team’s welcome could not have been friendlier. There was information about the furnishings and décor in the rooms, and activities for young people. The volunteers talked knowledgeably and with passion about Wordsworth’s life there, and in the kitchen a charming lady was decorating Easter eggs, just as they would have been done in the poet's day. On information boards in the basement I read about the building’s historical context and its place in the community. In two of the unfurnished rooms there was an exhibition by a local poet and artist keen to enhance our appreciation of the beauties of the Lake District. It was encouraging ‘inclusivity’ but perfectly appropriately and, most importantly, it was mature and grown-up, unlike the childish exhibitions that I had found at Penrhyn.
As I left, I reflected on how pleasant and indeed hope-inspiring it was to find such an absence of 'wokeness'. But then I had an ominous foreboding: might I find things changed on my next visit?